Movie Review: On Fire

 

Michael’s Movie Grade: F

A bottom of the barrel disaster movie. 

This film starts with a title telling us it is based on a true story. However watching the film, it simply feels like nothing but a plethora of cliches. Every scene feels like something you have probably seen in a million better movies. Watching this for the first (and only) time, I still felt like I was watching a movie I had already seen before. However as obvious as the clichés are nothing can compare to the awful dialogue. This is some of the worst dialogue I have heard in a mainstream movie in quite a while. Some of it is painfully obvious and some is unintentionally funny. I mean this is a disaster movie about a wildfire, where a character says in all seriousness, “fires are scary” and in a later scene the teenage son stands looking towards the fire and cussing at it. Also terrible is the emotional scenes. All of these feel completely manipulative. Any emotion we feel does not come from a connection to the story or characters but rather us being forced to have those emotions by basic human empathy. We see a guy whose father is near death and the father given up wanting to live after his wife died and we are going to feel empathy. But we don’t ever feel like we know or care about either of these characters, we just simply acknowledge that the situation is very sad. This can only feel cheap and manipulative. 

Simply put this is a very bad movie.